2. Facebook advanced its marketing analytics

Facebook’s ad reporting is already one of the most insightful and accurate paid advertising measurement tools.

By tracking the right Facebook ad metrics, you’ll be able to optimize your campaigns and improve both your ads’ click-through rates and acquisition costs.

Now, advertisers can track the Facebook Page interactions, such as post reactions and shares in the omnichannel analytics for websites, applications, services, and bots.

For example, an e-commerce business can measure if people who comment on an item featured in their Page post go on to view that item on their website or purchase it in their app.

Facebook Report

But there’s more to it: Facebook also introduced a new AI-powered Automated Insights tool that’s especially beneficial to larger advertisers who need to segment their target audiences.

Facebook Report

If you’re marketing a product that’s sold in physical stores, the new
multi-channel analytics can help you better realize the ROI of your
campaigns.

3. There are now 1.94 billion monthly active users on Facebook

On May 3, Facebook released its first quarter earnings report.

As a Facebook advertiser, you can rest assured – the social media platform’s not going anywhere.

As reported by The Verge, the social media platform brought in just over $8 billion in revenue, a jump of 49 percent since the first quarter of 2016.

Moreover, the number of Facebook’s monthly active users has grown by 17% compared to the first quarter of 2016. And so has Instagram’s: the company just announced that it hit the milestone of 700 million monthly active users.

This is good news for anyone looking to reach a large audience of potential customers via paid social media advertising.

Due to the recent problem of fake news, Facebook’s taking additional steps to clean up our News Feeds from low-quality ads and posts.

In a blog update published on May 10, Facebook’s representatives told that:

“Starting today, we’re rolling out an update so people see fewer posts and ads in News Feed that link to these low-quality web page experiences. Similar to the work we’re already doing to stop misinformation, this update will help reduce the economic incentives of financially-motivated spammers.”

Facebook analyzed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.

The changes will roll out gradually over the upcoming months.

If you’re promoting high-quality landing pages with nothing spammy, you may even see a small increase in traffic as you can potentially be competing with fewer advertisers for your audience’s attention.

6. Facebook Dynamic Ads are now even more powerful

Facebook Dynamic Ads let advertisers create remarketing ads based on the person’s browsing history on a website.

For example, if a person visits an eCommerce website, they could be retargeted with a multi-product ad of the exact products they looked at.

Dynamic Ads

With the latest update, you can highlight up to 20 images from a catalog to represent a single item across the carousel ad format used with Dynamic Ads.

This means that you can advertise a single item such as a piece of clothing, recipe, hotel or destination with multiple images, making your remarketing ads even more efficient.

7. New entry questions for Facebook Groups

If you’re an admin of one or several Facebook groups, the following might be a nice surprise for you!

You can now setup up to three questions for people requesting to join their Group to answer.

As reported by TechCrunch, this lets admins screen potential members to ensure they’re the right fit for the group and will add constructively to the discussion, not just spam or troll the Group.

Facebook Groups

The answers and questions will only be seen by admins and moderators (don’t worry, no answers will be posted to the group).

If you’re managing a branded Facebook community, this could also be a good opportunity to ask about your audience’s interests and expectations, so that you can have even better discussions in the future.

Quick recap

You’ve reached the end of this news broadcast.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it means you can now go and apply your new knowledge to your Facebook ad campaigns.